One can disagree with specific actions, but the idea that he's some kind of antichrist because he suspended habeus corpus when Davis did the same thing won't fly. Grant, Roosevelt, Clinton and Bush all were involved with habeus corpus in ways that strict civil libertarians would object to.
Confronted with a crisis, a president has to decide if he or she is simply going to roll over as Buchanan did and let whatever happens happen, or take actions that will be controversial for somebody somewhere.
Lincoln behaved largely as I would expect a big government president to act given the opportunity to further expand big government. To your (good) list of Grant, Roosevelt, Clinton and Bush, add Bush, Obama, and - unless the nation lapses into sanity - Clinton.